Literature of Hope argues that romance is a fundamentally religious genre propelled by desire, that contemporary popular romance fiction is a rich religious site largely dominated and formed by women, and that this rich religious site is one laden with theological and ethical significance. I focus on Black women in the romance reading and writing community through the novels, oeuvre, fan communities, and person of Black historical novelist Beverly Jenkins. I begin by merging a virtue ethics account with book historical approaches to romance reader practices drawn from my IRB-approval oral history interviews and other sources. I then develop a theological and religious grounding that situates this literature and contemporary reader community by contextualizing them with analyses of Black women’s literary and historiographical traditions, womanist theological ethics, and various religious writing and reading practices. I use these to articulate and bring particularity to the scholarly insight that romance is narrative eschatology, showing how this works within Black women’s lives. Thinking from the common reader and writer refrain that the romance genre is a “literature of hope,” I argue that Black women’s romance reading and writing is a form of contemplation governed by an iconographic theological grammar of participation.